How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.

If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention,” then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter.

meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.

Hockney’s piece had trained them to look a certain way—a notably slow, broken-up luxuriating in textures. They saw the garden anew, in all its kaleidoscopic beauty. Hockney, who defines looking as a “positive act,” would have been pleased. For him, actual looking was a skill and a conscious decision that people rarely practiced; there was “a lot to see” only if you were willing and able to see

When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.

if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attends gentrification). But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not.

Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to.

I value bioregionalism for the even more basic reason that, just as attention may be the last resource we have to withhold, the physical world is our last common reference point.

Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.